The Lovers Assistant; Or, New Art of Love

E-text prepared by Sankar Viswanathan, Delphine Lettau, Joseph Cooper, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles Lawrence Clark Powell, Clark Memorial Library
W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan
Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington Benjamin Boyce, Duke University Louis Bredvold, University of Michigan John Butt, University of Edinburgh James L. Clifford, Columbia University Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Louis A. Landa, Princeton University Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota Ernest C. Mossner, University of Texas James Sutherland, University College, London H.T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles
Edna C. Davis, Clark Memorial Library

The publishing history of this translation has been sketched by Cross, in his History of Henry Fielding , and may simply be summarized here. The first edition, entitled Ovid's Art of Love Paraphrased and Adapted to the Present Time (or Times ) was first issued in February, 1747, and was advertised in the Gentleman's and Scots Magazines in that month. During March, further advertisements appeared in the London Magazine and the St. James Evening Post . The most extensive notice ran, however, in Fielding's own Jacobite Journal (No. 15), where it served as basis for a detailed comparison between the art of love and the art of Jacobitism. Of this 1747 anonymous, original edition no copy is known.
In 1759, the work was reissued in London and Dublin, under the title The Lover's Assistant , and again in London in 1760. Meanwhile, advertisements for the original edition, as by Henry Fielding, had been run by the publisher, Andrew Millar, in 1754 and 1758. Inasmuch as Millar apparently still had unsold sheets in 1758, the 1759 edition may comprise these sheets with new title pages and prefatory matter necessary because of Fielding's death in 1754. At any rate, the modern instances referred to by the author of the 1759 Preface are not too modern to have been written in 1747. There has been no reprint since 1760.